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As seen on slashdot, the author of the ATSC Capture and edit tool has placed a notice of license revokal at sourceforge.net. While the GPLv2-FAQ states that a program licensed under the GPL cannot be re-licenced to someone else exclusively, both the FAQ and the license text itself don’t actually say anything about the license not being irrevokable. While one could interpret the absence of an arbitrary revokation clause (GPv2L can terminate automatically in case of violation) as a hint the license cannot be revoked indeed, a nifty lawyer could well come up with a convincing-sounding argument for the opposite.

Perhaps someone with a proper legal background (FSFE-TF, SFLC anyone?) could contact the author and try to convince him to withdraw that statement. It’s already making its way around the internet, just google for artscap and you’ll come up with a fewhits. This might give people the wrong idea and lead more developers to try to revoke licenses for GPL’ed projects.

It seems the powers got the timing right again. The latest draft of GPLv3 is out of the door, the anti-GPLv3 pieces start coming in.

Linspire’s Kevin Carmony got another call from his buddy Bill and he’s written this. Others join in, like William Hurley here. He quotes Apache’s (or Google’s?) Greg Stein: "Due to pressure from developers, all software is moving towards permissive licensing." Mr. Hurley adds that "[...]developers care about the licenses on the software they use and incorporate into their projects, they like permissive licenses, and they will increasingly demand permissive licenses."

Right, if I was a software engineer working for some company with non-free software being my business model, then that’s exactly what I’d be looking for. Take same BSD-style (bad term, I know) licensed code, make it non-free and there you’ll have "earned" another buck. And right, Google is T3H CH4MP10N of the Free Software Community, isn’t it? There are so many Free Software products published by them I can’t even remember the name of any single one of them. But of course, someone who works for Google must be so smart he’s always right, right?

Oh yes, I think every developer in the world will want that. How strange that even GPLv2 is so popular. I wonder if folks like Carmony and Stein still live in the same world as we do. Linus Torvalds might not be p***ed about Tivo taking the Linux kernel and locking the hardware like they do, but I bet some of his co-developers are. Thousands of developers on this Earth have chosen the GPL because they want their Free Software to stay free. As long as so many players in the industry don’t start to play fair with other people’s software a big migration to more permissive licenses isn’t going to happen.

Yes, I want to see Free Software advance, but not by folks like Kevin Carmony, sellouts who give a crap about the community that provides them with the leverage they make their money with. Get your big paychecks from T3h Industry and leave us alone.

There has been coverage in the press recently that the new government of Thailand doesn’t like Free Software anymore. It seems they have made complete turnaround indeed, with newly appointed minister of IT putting in the classic econodwarf act, advocating non-free software and whatnot.

Of course, such things have happened before in other countries. Sometimes, it turned out that some non-free software company was behind the scenes all along. These companies are widely known for lobbying against Free Software where they can. And that’s what made it clear to me who really was behind the coup in Thailand: microsoft

Now the post itself is not very clueful, but since the site’s webmaster is the only DD I happen to know in meatspace I thought I might add a comment to it. And there came the trouble, one after another:

If you block the site’s cookies, you can’t comment.

If you don’t block the cookies but only post a link to this page, it’ll get caught by the spam filter. Why a link to an official Debian package page should get caught by the spam filter of a Debian-related website is a complete mystery to me.

If you try again, the website gently reminds you that you are a spammer now. And no, it won’t let you post another comment on the site, evar.

Unless you create an account, of course.

Ironically, the original post was made anonymously. And not, I can’t be bothered to open up yet another account for yet another website.

Anyways, to give you the clue: Instead of using that dirrrty dirrrty script the article’s author has provided, you could simply apt-get install ifrename. Users of etch or unstable might want to use aptitude instead of apt-get, of course.

This is an account of a Free Software project getting harrased by a ligitation troll. Methods used are frivolously applied patents, copyright and trademark infringment and the unavoidable lawsuits that usually come along in such cases.

This is a must read for everyone who still thinks software patents are a good idea. For all the others, please read it as well. You need to know The Enemytm.

I was disgusted when I read that report. I still find it hard to believe that someone can do such things and get away with it. Fortunately, nothing’s decided yet. Lets hope this example will be a good precedent for everyone, not only in the EU, to realise how bad software patents are.

I spotted a couple of strange things in today’s distrowatch.com news column.

First of all, he starts bashing the novell-ms deal. I don’t mind him doing that. However, I still fail to see what kind of significant impact this deal will have onto the world of Free Software (I will elaborate on that on a later post if I find the time). Joining the bandwaggon will give ms and novell lots of bad publicity, but it will give them lots of publicity, as well.

Anyways, that’s not my main concern. A couple of sections later you can read a very favourable review of Mandriva 2007. Unfortunately, the quick availability of non-free software components in Mandriva 2007 seems to be a big selling point for Ladislav. I wonder why he doesn’t use ms windows if all that non-free crappola a la acroread, flash, realplayer, codecs, mp3 are so important to him. The concern about mp3 is particulary ironic, making his complaints about the novell-ms deal look a wee bit hypocritic, doesn’t it? Ladislav is setting a bad example here, at least from the software freedom point of view. As long as people like him make the quality of the "GNU/Linux desktop experience" dependent on the availability of these non-free components, GNU/Linux will never be ready for the desktop. People have to be made aware of the alternatives, like vorbis, theora, gnash, xpdf and whatnot. A completely free software desktop is indeed possible, including all the multimedia bling. And its not very difficult to go there, actually. I mean, even he does mention gnewsense.

However, that’s not all of it. "Surprisingly," a raffle is announced immediately following the review. And what can you win? n boxes of …*drumroll*… Mandriva 2007 powapakk!!!

Coincidence? Perhaps? Perhaps Mr. Bodnar just sold out to Mandriva, pocketing some dough for a favourable review on one of the most popular GNU/Linux news and info websites.

Update: In a comment on the same page, it’s number 93 if you want to scroll down that far, Ladislav Bodnar rebukes that he never accepted any money or other compensation from Mandriva. He says that he bought the software himself.

Meanwhile Ubuntu keeps drowning in bug reports. That’s somewhat to be expected after a release, but one could also expect that bug reports get dealt with more quickly. I know many of the reports are upstream bugs, but the lack of acknowledgement of bug reports from the devs frutrates me. I’m sitting there trying to do proper triage for the bug report I’m involved in, and nothing happens.

This really shows the limits of a "semi-fork" like Ubuntu. Judging the number of Canonical employees and the current size of the developer community (including volunteer helpers), Ubuntu is simply not able to cope with their own success.

If you want to be a big player in the Linux distribution game, re-packaging Debian and adding some bling is not enough. You’ll have to develop significant in-house expertise on the software you are distributing if you don’t want to depend on the next upstream release to fix your users’ bugs. Redhat, SUSE/Novell, Debian have that. Other big players like Mandriva probably have it, as well. Ubuntu isn’t right there yet.

Ubuntu used to hype their bugsquad and their bug days. However, too many "unpopular" bugs that no-one wants to triage nor investigate still fall through the net. Take the three bugs I mentioned above. None of them are critical on their own. Added together however, they make the system unusable and have the potential of sending manymany users running aways after their first steps with GNU/Linux.

If Ubuntu really wants to do more things better than all the other distros, dealing with bugs should be one of their prime topics. A bug squad that actually looks at every reported bug and triages it properly instead of letting it rot in the bts would be a big advantage compared to other big distros. However, that requires significantly more developer power than Ubuntu has got at the moment.

And btw: Next time, please don’t disappear to conferences shortly after a release.

I’ve been following planet debian for quite a while now. I occasionally check out the debian-devel and debian-vote mailing lists, as well. The flamewars about the dunc-tank project did not evade my attention.

Many words were written in anger, votes called for, mock projects established, the DPL was re-affirmed and whatnot.

Of course, that did not stop some people to flame further. However, now the true reason for that has emerged. This blogpost shows that some of the opponents of the dunc-tank project don’t seem to be more than jealous hypocrites.